Cooler Master HAF XB Chassis Review

Installation time took nearly 40 minutes, which isn’t exactly quick but it took a while for good reason, I read the instruction booklet as I did it. This is partly because of the unique nature of the chassis layout and its generally pretty straight forward. While you do need some forward planning for the first install to ensure you can still hook up all the various power cables, the modular design lends its self well to being able to make quick changes to any of the components, which is obviously a good thing given that this is a test bench.

Cable management may look poor here, but it’s really now and there is just a good amount of cable tucking space on the right side of the chassis, and there are no hard drive bays on this side to worry about as the hot swap bays are accessed from the front of the chassis.

Around the left side of the chassis things look much neater, with no obstructions in the way of our GTX 560 Ti card and plenty of room for a multi GPU setup.

The two fans on the front of the chassis are clear of cables and components, meaning they can freely blow air directly at our GPU and CPU cooler.

I had no issues fitting the Antec 920 Kuhler in here and its good to know that the chassis can handle such a bulky 120mm radiator. Swapping out coolers, graphics cards and RAM is very easy here and thanks to the large removable top panel its easy to keep tabs on your hardware when benchmarking, testing or just installing / removing something.

With all the panels back in place you can barely tell there is anything installed but the extensive ventilation on every side of this chassis should keep things nice and cool and the heavy-duty panels should keep it all nice and safe.